Residences are presently coupled to many sources of audio/visual entertainment, communications, and computing signals, including, computer modems, cable television feeds, satellite television feeds, telephone, over-the-air television and so on. Each of these sources of signals enters a residence and is routed via cables to an associated communications appliance, i.e., the telephone signals are routed through the home on a twisted-pair cable to a telephone, the cable television signals are routed through the home on a coaxial cable to a cable set top box, and so on. As such, a residence will have many cables, wires and other communications connections throughout the home. Each time an appliance is to be moved from one location to another, the signal cabling must be rerouted. Such cutting and splicing leads to noisy connections and signal degradation that severely effects the fidelity of the signal.
To remedy this problem, wireless local area networks (LAN) have been developed that implement the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standard 802.11a. This standard defines a wireless LAN system that uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (e.g., 48 carriers carrying 64-QAM signals in a 20 MHz wide channel) and defines the control layer to utilize the media access control (MAC) protocol. A plurality of the carriers are used as pilot tones to achieve receiver synchronization. Multipath interference is controlled by having many carriers propagating a low data rate signal, e.g., 256 kbit. As such, the data rate for the system is limited within a given bandwidth. Conversely, higher data rates necessitate greater bandwidth.
Therefore, a need exists in the art for a broadband, wireless network that provides a user with a flexible environment for using and locating their communications appliances.
The present invention provides a residential communications gateway that accepts all incoming communications signals and securely broadcasts those signals throughout a residence. Each communications appliance within the residence is outfitted with a receiver that decodes the broadcast signals and couples the signals to the input terminals of the associated communications appliance. The system is completely xe2x80x9cplug-and-playxe2x80x9d such that a user can quickly and easily utilize the gateway for many communications appliances.
Each receiver is equipped with an antenna array and a multipath signal processor to ensure that each communications appliance received a robust, error free signal no matter where it is located in the home. The multipath signal processor comprises adaptive signal processing in both spatial and temporal domains to ensure that multipath signals are sufficiently suppressed to enable accurate decoding of the received signal.